The present invention generally relates to wireless communication receivers, and particularly relates to the selection of demodulation processing delays in wireless communication receivers.
Advanced communication systems provide flexible voice and data services. Many advanced communication networks are based on direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA). For example, cdma2000 is prevalent in North America while wideband CDMA (WCDMA) is deployed throughout Europe and Japan. These advanced communication systems provide increased system bandwidth, i.e., wider bandwidth, to satisfy the performance requirements associated with feature-rich services.
A pseudorandom noise (PN) sequence is used to spread the spectrum of a DS-CDMA signal waveform. The rate of the spreading sequence, i.e., the chip rate, is chosen so that the bandwidth of the filtered signal is several times the bandwidth of the original signal. As such, each information symbol to be transmitted is represented by a number of chips. Representing one symbol by many chips enables spreading. Conventional DS-CDMA networks may utilize multiple PN sequences. In addition, such networks may use orthogonal spreading codes of known lengths to ensure orthogonality between signals intended for different users. Spread signals are then up-converted to a carrier frequency and transmitted over a communication channel. The communication channel causes multipath signal propagation, thus causing multiple resolvable echoes of the transmitted signal, also referred to as rays or images.
RAKE and Generalized RAKE (G-RAKE) receivers are conventionally used to receive and process DS-CDMA signals transmitted in advanced communication networks such as cdma2000 and WCDMA based networks. RAKE receivers treat the effects of multipath fading on signal interference, which may consist of intersymbol interference (ISI), multi-user interference (MUI), inter-path interference (IPI) and thermal noise, as Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN). However, a multipath fading channel often causes significant spectral distortion of the overall interference, thus causing colored interference. G-RAKE receivers improve upon RAKE receivers in that they suppress colored Gaussian noise arising from multipath propagation and pulse-shaping by using selective finger placement techniques and combining weights to account for the color of the interference. As part of receive signal despreading, G-RAKE receivers determine where to place ‘finger’ delays, i.e., demodulation processing delays associated with one or more receiver antennas. The selected delays are provided to a correlation unit, which despreads one or more traffic channels by assigning the selected delays to various correlators, thereby producing traffic despread values. The selected delays may align some correlators to signal paths associated with a multipath fading channel to collect signal energy and may align other correlators off the signal paths to characterize colored interference. In addition, the selected delays are also provided to a weight computation unit which computes combining weights. The traffic despread values produced by the correlators are then combined in a combiner unit in accordance with the combining weights to produce soft bit values.
Functionality similar to that provided by G-RAKE receivers is supplied by conventional chip equalizers. Chip samples are provided to a baseband processor included in a chip equalizer. The baseband processor comprises a Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter for equalizing chip samples received from a multipath channel. The FIR filter includes a number of taps corresponding to filter delays. Tap delays are selected in a similar manner as finger delays are selected in a G-RAKE receiver, that is, to tradeoff between whitening the overall colored interference and collecting the energy of the desired signal. The selected tap delays are weighted according to filter weighting coefficients generated by a weight computation unit. The FIR filter filters the chip samples, thus producing a signal that is then despread by a correlator to produce soft bit values.
Receivers that whiten colored noise interference such as G-RAKE and chip equalizer based receivers have a limited quantity of signal processing resources available for baseband signal processing, e.g., correlators or equalization filter taps. Because of the limited processing resources available for processing a multipath fading signal, only a subset of available demodulation processing delays may be assigned to the processing resources. As such, selection of delays assigned to signal processing resources included in conventional G-RAKE and chip equalizer receivers is a delicate tradeoff between matching to a multipath fading channel and whitening of colored noise.